OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
IStego100K: Large-scale Image Steganalysis Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In order to promote the rapid development of image steganalysis technology, in this paper, we construct and release a multivariable large-scale image steganalysis dataset called IStego100K. It contains 208,104 images with the same size of 1024*1024. Among them, 200,000 images (100,000 cover-stego image pairs) are divided as the training set and the remaining 8,104 as testing set. In addition, we hope that IStego100K can help researchers further explore the development of universal image steganalysis algorithms, so we try to reduce limits on the images in IStego100K. For each image in IStego100K, the quality factors is randomly set in the range of 75-95, the steganographic algorithm is randomly selected from three well-known steganographic algorithms, which are J-uniward, nsF5 and UERD, and the embedding rate is also randomly set to be a value of 0.1-0.4. In addition, considering the possible mismatch between training samples and test samples in real environment, we add a test set (DS-Test) whose source of samples are different from the training set. We hope that this test set can help to evaluate the robustness of steganalysis algorithms. We tested the performance of some latest steganalysis algorithms on IStego100K, with specific results and analysis details in the experimental part. We hope that the IStego100K dataset will further promote the development of universal image steganalysis technology. The description of IStego100K and instructions for use can be found at https://github.com/YangzlTHU/IStego100K
Learning Relationships between Text, Audio, and Video via Deep Canonical Correlation for Multimodal Language Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Multimodal language analysis often considers relationships between features based on text and those based on acoustical and visual properties. Text features typically outperform non-text features in sentiment analysis or emotion recognition tasks in part because the text features are derived from advanced language models or word embeddings trained on massive data sources while audio and video features are human-engineered and comparatively underdeveloped. Given that the text, audio, and video are describing the same utterance in different ways, we hypothesize that the multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition can be improved by learning (hidden) correlations between features extracted from the outer product of text and audio (we call this text-based audio) and analogous text-based video. This paper proposes a novel model, the Interaction Canonical Correlation Network (ICCN), to learn such multimodal embeddings. ICCN learns correlations between all three modes via deep canonical correlation analysis (DCCA) and the proposed embeddings are then tested on several benchmark datasets and against other state-of-the-art multimodal embedding algorithms. Empirical results and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of ICCN in capturing useful information from all three views.
Diagnosis of Pediatric Obstructive Sleep Apnea via Face Classification with Persistent Homology and Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Obstructive sleep apnea is a serious condition causing a litany of health problems especially in the pediatric population. However, this chronic condition can be treated if diagnosis is possible. The gold standard for diagnosis is an overnight sleep study, which is often unobtainable by many potentially suffering from this condition. Hence, we attempt to develop a fast non-invasive diagnostic tool by training a classifier on 2D and 3D facial images of a patient to recognize facial features associated with obstructive sleep apnea. In this comparative study, we consider both persistent homology and geometric shape analysis from the field of computational topology as well as convolutional neural networks, a powerful method from deep learning whose success in image and specifically facial recognition has already been demonstrated by computer scientists.
Exploiting GAN Internal Capacity for High-Quality Reconstruction of Natural Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have demonstrated impressive results in modeling the distribution of natural images, learning latent representations that capture semantic variations in an unsupervised basis. Beyond the generation of novel samples, it is of special interest to exploit the ability of the GAN generator to model the natural image manifold and hence generate credible changes when manipulating images. However, this line of work is conditioned by the quality of the reconstruction. Until now, only inversion to the latent space has been considered, we propose to exploit the representation in intermediate layers of the generator, and we show that this leads to increased capacity. In particular, we observe that the representation after the first dense layer, present in all state-of-the-art GAN models, is expressive enough to represent natural images with high visual fidelity. It is possible to interpolate around these images obtaining a sequence of new plausible synthetic images that cannot be generated from the latent space. Finally, as an example of potential applications that arise from this inversion mechanism, we show preliminary results in exploiting the learned representation in the attention map of the generator to obtain an unsupervised segmentation of natural images.
Enumerative Data Compression with Non-Uniquely Decodable Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2019
Year: 2019

Non-uniquely decodable codes can be defined as the codes that cannot be uniquely decoded without additional disambiguation information. These are mainly the class of non-prefix-free codes, where a codeword can be a prefix of other(s), and thus, the codeword boundary information is essential for correct decoding. Although the codeword bit stream consumes significantly less space when compared to prefix--free codes, the additional disambiguation information makes it difficult to catch the performance of prefix-free codes in total. Previous studies considered compression with non-prefix-free codes by integrating rank/select dictionaries or wavelet trees to mark the code-word boundaries. In this study we focus on another dimension with a block--wise enumeration scheme that improves the compression ratios of the previous studies significantly. Experiments conducted on a known corpus showed that the proposed scheme successfully represents a source within its entropy, even performing better than the Huffman and arithmetic coding in some cases. The non-uniquely decodable codes also provides an intrinsic security feature due to lack of unique-decodability. We investigate this dimension as an opportunity to provide compressed data security without (or with less) encryption, and discuss various possible practical advantages supported by such codes.
Predictive Multi-level Patient Representations from Electronic Health Records
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The advent of the Internet era has led to an explosive growth in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) in the past decades. The EHR data can be regarded as a collection of clinical events, including laboratory results, medication records, physiological indicators, etc, which can be used for clinical outcome prediction tasks to support constructions of intelligent health systems. Learning patient representation from these clinical events for the clinical outcome prediction is an important but challenging step. Most related studies transform EHR data of a patient into a sequence of clinical events in temporal order and then use sequential models to learn patient representations for outcome prediction. However, clinical event sequence contains thousands of event types and temporal dependencies. We further make an observation that clinical events occurring in a short period are not constrained by any temporal order but events in a long term are influenced by temporal dependencies. The multi-scale temporal property makes it difficult for traditional sequential models to capture the short-term co-occurrence and the long-term temporal dependencies in clinical event sequences. In response to the above challenges, this paper proposes a Multi-level Representation Model (MRM). MRM first uses a sparse attention mechanism to model the short-term co-occurrence, then uses interval-based event pooling to remove redundant information and reduce sequence length and finally predicts clinical outcomes through Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Experiments on real-world datasets indicate that our proposed model largely improves the performance of clinical outcome prediction tasks using EHR data.
Graph Representation Learning via Multi-task Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Machine learning on graph structured data has attracted much research interest due to its ubiquity in real world data. However, how to efficiently represent graph data in a general way is still an open problem. Traditional methods use handcraft graph features in a tabular form but suffer from the defects of domain expertise requirement and information loss. Graph representation learning overcomes these defects by automatically learning the continuous representations from graph structures, but they require abundant training labels, which are often hard to fulfill for graph-level prediction problems. In this work, we demonstrate that, if available, the domain expertise used for designing handcraft graph features can improve the graph-level representation learning when training labels are scarce. Specifically, we proposed a multi-task knowledge distillation method. By incorporating network-theory-based graph metrics as auxiliary tasks, we show on both synthetic and real datasets that the proposed multi-task learning method can improve the prediction performance of the original learning task, especially when the training data size is small.
Transfer Value Iteration Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Value iteration networks (VINs) have been demonstrated to have a good generalization ability for reinforcement learning tasks across similar domains. However, based on our experiments, a policy learned by VINs still fail to generalize well on the domain whose action space and feature space are not identical to those in the domain where it is trained. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning approach on top of VINs, termed Transfer VINs (TVINs), such that a learned policy from a source domain can be generalized to a target domain with only limited training data, even if the source domain and the target domain have domain-specific actions and features. We empirically verify that our proposed TVINs outperform VINs when the source and the target domains have similar but not identical action and feature spaces. Furthermore, we show that the performance improvement is consistent across different environments, maze sizes, dataset sizes as well as different values of hyperparameters such as number of iteration and kernel size.
On the Relativized Alon Second Eigenvalue Conjecture VI: Sharp Bounds for Ramanujan Base Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2019
Year: 2019

This is the sixth in a series of articles devoted to showing that a typical covering map of large degree to a fixed, regular graph has its new adjacency eigenvalues within the bound conjectured by Alon for random regular graphs. In this article we show that if the fixed graph is regular Ramanujan, then the {\em algebraic power} of the model of random covering graphs is $+\infty$. This implies a number of interesting results, such as (1) one obtains the upper and lower bounds---matching to within a multiplicative constant---for the probability that a random covering map has some new adjacency eigenvalue outside the Alon bound, and (2) with probability smaller than any negative power of the degree of the covering map, some new eigenvalue fails to be within the Alon bound without the covering map containing one of finitely many "tangles" as a subgraph (and this tangle containment event has low probability).
Systematic Classification of Attackers via Bounded Model Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In this work, we study the problem of verification of systems in the presence of attackers using bounded model checking. Given a system and a set of security requirements, we present a methodology to generate and classify attackers, mapping them to the set of requirements that they can break. A naive approach suffers from the same shortcomings of any large model checking problem, i.e., memory shortage and exponential time. To cope with these shortcomings, we describe two sound heuristics based on cone-of-influence reduction and on learning, which we demonstrate empirically by applying our methodology to a set of hardware benchmark systems.
Character Keypoint-based Homography Estimation in Scanned Documents for Efficient Information Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Precise homography estimation between multiple images is a pre-requisite for many computer vision applications. One application that is particularly relevant in today's digital era is the alignment of scanned or camera-captured document images such as insurance claim forms for information extraction. Traditional learning based approaches perform poorly due to the absence of an appropriate gradient. Feature based keypoint extraction techniques for homography estimation in real scene images either detect an extremely large number of inconsistent keypoints due to sharp textual edges, or produce inaccurate keypoint correspondences due to variations in illumination and viewpoint differences between document images. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for aligning scanned or camera-captured document images using character based keypoints and a reference template. The algorithm is both fast and accurate and utilizes a standard Optical character recognition (OCR) engine such as Tesseract to find character based unambiguous keypoints, which are utilized to identify precise keypoint correspondences between two images. Finally, the keypoints are used to compute the homography mapping between a test document and a template. We evaluated the proposed approach for information extraction on two real world anonymized datasets comprised of health insurance claim forms and the results support the viability of the proposed technique.
Majorization-Minimization Aided Hybrid Transceivers for MIMO Interference Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The potential of deploying large-scale antenna arrays in future wireless systems has stimulated extensive research on hybrid transceiver designs aiming to approximate the optimal fully-digital schemes with much reduced hardware cost and signal processing complexity. Generally, this hybrid transceiver structure requires a joint design of analog and digital processing to enable both beamsteering and spatial multiplexing gains. In this paper, we develop various weighted mean-square-error minimization (WMMSE) based hybrid transceiver designs over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels at both millimeter wave (mmWave) and microwave frequencies. Firstly, a heuristic joint design of hybrid precoder and combiner using alternating optimization is proposed, in which the majorization-minimization (MM) method is utilized to design the analog precoder and combiner with unit-modulus constraints. It is validated that this scheme achieves the comparable performance to the WMMSE fully-digital solution. To further reduce the complexity, a phase projection-based two-stage scheme is proposed to decouple the designs of analog and digital precoder combiner. Secondly, inspired by the fully-digital solutions based on the block-diagonalization zero-forcing (BD-ZF) and signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) criteria, low-complexity MMbased BD-ZF and SLNR hybrid designs are proposed to well approximate the corresponding fully-digital solutions. Thirdly, the partially-connected hybrid structure for reducing system hardware cost and power consumption is considered, for which the MM-based alternating optimization still works. Numerical results demonstrate the similar or superior performance of all the above proposed schemes over the existing benchmarks.
Adversarial Margin Maximization Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

The tremendous recent success of deep neural networks (DNNs) has sparked a surge of interest in understanding their predictive ability. Unlike the human visual system which is able to generalize robustly and learn with little supervision, DNNs normally require a massive amount of data to learn new concepts. In addition, research works also show that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples-maliciously generated images which seem perceptually similar to the natural ones but are actually formed to fool learning models, which means the models have problem generalizing to unseen data with certain type of distortions. In this paper, we analyze the generalization ability of DNNs comprehensively and attempt to improve it from a geometric point of view. We propose adversarial margin maximization (AMM), a learning-based regularization which exploits an adversarial perturbation as a proxy. It encourages a large margin in the input space, just like the support vector machines. With a differentiable formulation of the perturbation, we train the regularized DNNs simply through back-propagation in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results on various datasets (including MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, SVHN and ImageNet) and different DNN architectures demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-arts. Code and models for reproducing our results will be made publicly available.
A Scalable Approach for Facial Action Unit Classifier Training UsingNoisy Data for Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Machine learning systems are being used to automate many types of laborious labeling tasks. Facial actioncoding is an example of such a labeling task that requires copious amounts of time and a beyond average level of human domain expertise. In recent years, the use of end-to-end deep neural networks has led to significant improvements in action unit recognition performance and many network architectures have been proposed. Do the more complex deep neural network(DNN) architectures perform sufficiently well to justify the additional complexity? We show that pre-training on a large diverse set of noisy data can result in even a simple CNN model improving over the current state-of-the-art DNN architectures.The average F1-score achieved with our proposed method on the DISFA dataset is 0.60, compared to a previous state-of-the-art of 0.57. Additionally, we show how the number of subjects and number of images used for pre-training impacts the model performance. The approach that we have outlined is open-source, highly scalable, and not dependent on the model architecture. We release the code and data: https://github.com/facialactionpretrain/facs.
Hiding in Multilayer Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

Multilayer networks allow for modeling complex relationships, where individuals are embedded in multiple social networks at the same time. Given the ubiquity of such relationships, these networks have been increasingly gaining attention in the literature. This paper presents the first analysis of the robustness of centrality measures against strategic manipulation in multilayer networks. More specifically, we consider an "evader" who strategically chooses which connections to form in a multilayer network in order to obtain a low centrality-based ranking-thereby reducing the chance of being highlighted as a key figure in the network-while ensuring that she remains connected to a certain group of people. We prove that determining an optimal way to "hide" is NP-complete and hard to approximate for most centrality measures considered in our study. Moreover, we empirically evaluate a number of heuristics that the evader can use. Our results suggest that the centrality measures that are functions of the entire network topology are more robust to such a strategic evader than their counterparts which consider each layer separately.
Ethanos: Lightweight Bootstrapping for Ethereum
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

As ethereum blockchain has become popular, the number of users and transactions has skyrocketed, causing an explosive increase of its data size. As a result, ordinary clients using PCs or smartphones cannot easily bootstrap as a full node, but rely on other full nodes such as the miners to run or verify transactions. This may affect the security of ethereum, so light bootstrapping techniques such as fast sync has been proposed to download only parts of full data, yet the space overhead is still too high. One of the biggest space overhead that cannot easily be reduced is caused by saving the state of all accounts in the block's state trie. Fortunately, we found that more than 90% of accounts are inactive and old transactions are hard to be manipulated. Based on these observations, this paper propose a novel optimization technique called ethanos that can reduce bootstrapping cost by sweeping inactive accounts periodically and by not downloading old transactions. If an inactive account becomes active, ethanos restore its state by running a restoration transaction. Also, ethanos gives incentives for archive nodes to maintain the old transactions for possible re-verification. We implemented ethanos by instrumenting the go-ethereum (geth) client and evaluated with the real 113 million transactions from 14 million accounts between 7M-th and 8M-th blocks in ethereum. Our experimental result shows that ethanos can reduce the size of the account state by half, which, if combined with removing old transactions, may reduce the storage size for bootstrapping to around 1GB. This would be reasonable enough for ordinary clients to bootstrap on their personal devices.
Efficient Direct Slicing Of Dilated And Eroded 3d Models For Additive Manufacturing: Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2019
Year: 2019

In the context of additive manufacturing we present a novel technique for direct slicing of a dilated or eroded volume, where the input volume boundary is a triangle mesh. Rather than computing a 3D model of the boundary of the dilated or eroded volume, our technique directly produces its slices. This leads to a computationally and memory efficient algorithm, which is embarrassingly parallel. Contours can be extracted under an arbitrary chord error, non-uniform dilation or erosion are also possible. Finally, the scheme is simple and robust to implement.
Privacy and Utility Preserving Sensor-Data Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Sensitive inferences and user re-identification are major threats to privacy when raw sensor data from wearable or portable devices are shared with cloud-assisted applications. To mitigate these threats, we propose mechanisms to transform sensor data before sharing them with applications running on users' devices. These transformations aim at eliminating patterns that can be used for user re-identification or for inferring potentially sensitive activities, while introducing a minor utility loss for the target application (or task). We show that, on gesture and activity recognition tasks, we can prevent inference of potentially sensitive activities while keeping the reduction in recognition accuracy of non-sensitive activities to less than 5 percentage points. We also show that we can reduce the accuracy of user re-identification and of the potential inference of gender to the level of a random guess, while keeping the accuracy of activity recognition comparable to that obtained on the original data.